Serendipity Book

The Average Briton

The Daily Telegraph reminds us what average is:

Via: axiamotion on Reddit.com

Slowdown in digital ad revenues, but ...

The FT reports this morning that GroupM (WPP's umbrella for all of its media agencies) are predicting a slowdown in the rate of growth of internet advertising'in the UK as a function of broadband penetration reaching a plateau and the lack of opportunities to buy media space on social networks...

Adam Smith, GroupM futures director, said: “The rationale behind the internet slowdown theory is that UK broadband penetration can’t continue growing at the same rate, and how much more time can people spend online?

“Unless we can find more ways of shoe-horning advertising into sites or vendors increase the amount of advertising inventory they sell, then at some point it has to slow.

“In addition, running in the opposite direction is the growth of social networks which are much more ad-resistant.”

But ... before we get carried away here let's of course remember not to conflate "internet advertising" with digital marketing. Whilst paid-for media (and the media agencies like GroupM that rely on it) struggle to find space to buy, digital creative will still find an audience if it is good enough.

Wikipedia accounts for 1 in 200 page views

  wikipedia accounts for 1 in 200 page views 
  Originally uploaded by lynetter.

Lynette Webb quotes an article about Wikipedia in the NYT a few days ago in one of her regular picture postcards from the web.

She says: "[The article] doesn’t just rehash the old “wikipedia has errors” / “wikipedia vs encyopedia britannica” angle but gives an indepth look at people who contribute to wikipedia and the overall culture, as well as making the interesting point that wikipedia is morphing into a kind of news hub."

Walking and talking can be dangerous

The British Psychological Society digest reports on some new research into the hazards of walking whilst using a mobile phone.

The research, conducted by researchers at the department of town planning at Ohio State and based on a small observational study, showed what many drivers and cyclists already know, that half of the pedestrians observed using a mobile were unsafe users of road crossings:

The road crossing behaviour of 48 per cent of the mobile phone users was categorised as unsafe – they tended to cross the road when a car was approaching, yet they typically stopped at the roadside when the traffic had stopped.

Tory Map of The World

Nice. Click to enlarge or go here for a huge version.

Picture Credit: Jo T on Flickr via Reddit

10 curious facts

10 curious things I found out on my interweb travels this week ...

1. Europe's share of global population will fall from 21% now to 7% by 2050 (The Economist)

2. Just 3% of commuters in the UK cycle to work even though 4 million people drive less than three miles to work (The Guardian)

3. The number of stay-at-home mothers fell by nearly a quarter from 2.7 million to 2.1 million between 1993 and 2007 and the number of "housedads" has doubled from 100,000 to 200,000 (The Guardian).

4. A London house that sold for £100,000 in 1976 would now be worth £4.2 million (The Telegraph)

5. Nearly one in 10 UK households now employs domestic help to do cleaning, cooking or ironing (The Telegraph)

6. One fifth of British people are unaware that bacon and sausages come from farms (BBC News Online)

7. Students graduating last summer were saddled with an average total debt of just over £13,250 per head (The Telegraph)

8. Whilst 69 per cent of mothers start out breast-feeding their newborns, 21 per cent stop within the first fortnight (The Telegraph)

9. More than 1.1 billion of the world's estimated 6.6 billion people are online and almost a third of those are now accessing the internet on high speed lines (The Guardian)

10. In the USA in 2006 nearly 14,000 boys age 13 to 19 underwent surgery to reduce the size of their breasts (New York Times).

Picture Credit: Russell Davies

10 Interesting Facts

Some interesting things that appeared on my radar this weekend whilst hiding at home with a cold ...

1. Women in Britain are choosing to have more babies than at any time since 1980 (The Guardian)

2. Teens who are most physically active and consume the most calories are the leanest (Future Pundit)

3. On the eve of the First World War, home ownership in Britain stood at only 10 per cent (The Times)

4. Of all parents with children aged 18-29, nearly 50% still have an adult child living at home (Joseph Rowntree Foundation / MORI)

5. Face-recognition algorithms can now perform more accurately than most humans can manage (Future Pundit)

6. A hundred years ago there was a greater proportion of women working in manufacturing than there is today (The Guardian)

7. You can get a Web 2.0 company off the ground for £6,000 (Guy Kawasaki)

8. It can take 45 minutes to clean off one flyposter (Glasgow Evening Times)

9. Tesco’s turnover is equivalent to the total agricultural budget for the 27 EU countries (The Times Letters)

10. More of the UK's workforce put in "excessive hours" than in any other developed country (ILO / The Register)

Now, was that parasitical on journalism or does it demonstrate a symbiotic relationship between blogging and the media?

Picture credit: Bleicher

Hans Rosling: Visualizing Change

You must watch Hans Rosling's talk from TED. This guy really knows how to bring data to life. Hans campaigns for access to publicly funded data sources and has established the Gapminder Foundation to make it easier for people to visualise and explore numbers.

"You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world” using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling’s hands, global trends — life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates — become clear, intuitive and even playful."

Where would you rather work?

Mercer have announced the results of their latest expat quality of life city survey and The Economist have kindly charted some of it for us. 

Mercer’s study is based on 39 measures grouped in the following categories:

• Political and social environment   (political stability, crime, law enforcement, etc)
  
• Economic environment (currency   exchange regulations, banking services, etc)
  
• Socio-cultural environment   (censorship, limitations on personal freedom, etc)
  
• Health and sanitation (medical   supplies and services, infectious diseases, sewage, waste disposal, air   pollution, etc)
• Schools and education (standard and   availability of international schools, etc)
• Public services and transportation   (electricity, water, public transport, traffic congestion,   etc)
• Recreation (restaurants, theatres,   cinemas, sports and leisure, etc)
• Consumer goods (availability of   food/daily consumption items, cars, etc)
  
• Housing (housing, household   appliances, furniture, maintenance services, etc)

The complete rankings can be viewed here. Interesting that almost half of the 30 top-scoring cities surveyed are in Western Europe and yet London ranks at 39.

Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column wins 2007 Award for statistical excellence in journalism

Mark Earl's notes that The Royal Statistical Society has awarded Guardian writer and blogger Ben Goldacre with their first ever award for statistical excellence in journalism for his April 2006 article "When the facts get in the way of the story".

Ben relentlessly campaigns against the abuse of science and lazy science reporting and takes great pleasure in exposing quacks and charlatans. I've blogged about this article a couple of times before, once when suggesting that people would do well to have a basic level of understanding of statistics and again in response to reading the vitriolic abuse in the comments on his blog and appealing for everyone to just be nice.

In the article Ben challenges the errors behind the hysterical reporting in the media of a government survey into drug use amongst schoolchildren. The article explores the rather significant gap that exists between the interpretation given by government statisticians ("there has been almost no change in patterns of drug use, drinking or smoking since 2000") and that offered to us by our media (e.g. The Times: "Cocaine Floods the Playground").

The second prize went to Times star columnist Matthew Parris for his piece "The truth about those little red lights: a tale of power and poppycock". Third prize went to the Economist writer Paul Wallace for his piece, "Transatlantic rivals" (behind the subscriber wall but there is a copy here on UCL's site)

As I mentioned in this post a few months ago, the incorrect reporting of surveys and scientific research in the media really riles me:

"Our media increasingly appear to expect us to take it on trust that survey data they present us with is valid and that their interpretation is the only one possible and that we don't need to be bothered with the details.

This wouldn't be a problem if I felt that all surveys were as valid as each other and I believed in the interpretation provided by the journalist who wrote the copy. They are not and I don't.

Far too often journalists have demonstrated that they do not have the skills to evaluate survey data. Far too often journalists choose to report the simple story that they see in the data without respecting the complexity of the human beings it seeks to describe. Far too often the reader is being misled into believing something that is not true.

This is one area where I wish planners were less like journalists."

So there.